A Million Heavens by John Branden
McSweeney&#39;s; $24.00
John Brandon regaled us all fall with the escapades of one Honey Badger, quick-footed bane of the SEC gridiron. He&#39;s turned his attention these days to a predator of a different stripe: a lone wolf, slinking out his waning years&#39; rounds through a Santa Fe desert populated by a heartbreaking cast of delinquents and stargazers, losers at love and losers of lifeliterally, a dead guy, a musician, being bullied in the most quietly terrifying heaven ever rendered in literature into writing more songs, effectively unraveling the lives of several unwitting desert-dwellers below. Don&#39;t let the title, which we&#39;re well aware sounds like a made-for-tv movie starring Julia Roberts&#39;s niece, turn you off; we wish Brandon had stuck with place-names too, as in his magnificent precursors Citrus County and Arkansas. The desert, indeed, is as much a character here as the wolf and the limbo-ed musician&amp;#8212the sky &quot;like a stretched old cloth,&quot; the moon &quot;a tarnished coin in the ozone,&quot; a land &quot;where the dunes shifted overnight and scorpions feared their own stinging tails&quot;and the title could have just as comfortably been &quot;A Million Hells&quot; for all the comfort it offers its wrecked, Missed-Connection citizens and denizens. From such barren surroundings does this rich, haunting, confounding book spring, as intricate as any LSU play call and guaranteed to bedevil your mind at least until Brandon&#39;s first pre-season dispatch.Kira Henehan